Status Report.ppt

Status Report Ian Pratt University of Cambridge and Founder of XenSource Inc. Overview Xen Today: 2.0.5 Xen 3.0 Development Update New benchmark results Ongoing research Xen Today : 2.0 Features Secure isolation between VMs Resource control and QoS Only guest kernel needs to be ported All user-level apps and libraries run unmodified Linux 2.4/2.6, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Plan9 Execution performance is close to native Supports the same hardware as Linux x86 Live Relocation of VMs between Xen nodes Para-Virtualization in Xen Arch xen_x86 : like x86, but replace privileged instructions with Xen hypercalls Avoids binary rewriting and fault trapping For Linux 2.6, only arch-dep files modified Modify OS to understand virtualised env. Wall-clock time vs. virtual processor time Xen provides both types of alarm timer Expose real resource availability Enables OS to optimise behaviour MMU virtualisation: direct vs. shadow mode I/O Architecture Xen IO-Spaces delegate guest OSes protected access to specified h/w devices Virtual PCI configuration space Virtual interrupts Devices are virtualised and exported to other VMs via Device Channels Safe asynchronous shared memory transport ‘Backend’ drivers export to ‘frontend’ drivers Net: use normal bridging, routing, iptables Block: export any blk dev e.g. sda4,loop0,vg3 Xen 2.0 Architecture Xen 3.0 Architecture 3.0 Headline Features AGP/DRM in dom0 ACPI/PCI support in dom0 Support for SMP guests x86_64 support Intel VT-x support for unmodified guests Enhanced control and management tools Optimised inter-VM networking IA64 and Power support, PAE36 x86_64 AMD Opteron and Intel EM64T Requires different approach to plain x86 Can’t use segmentation to protect Xen from guest OS kernels Switch page tables between kernel and user Large VA space offers other optimisations Current design supports up to 8TB mem Call for user testing in ~2-3 weeks SMP Guest OSes Takes great care to get good performance while remaining secure Paravirtualized